Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
Chapter 12 – Organizational Change
Slide 1 – Opening
Slide 2 – Chapter Objectives
•Identify types of change
•Apply the different models for change
•Work with/around culture to implement change
•Apply the different methods for bringing about change
•Understand the impact of politics on change management
Slide 3 – Managing Change
•If there is one constant in public organizations today, it is change. The environment of public and
nonprofit organizations, as well as those in the private sector, is rapidly changing, bringing new
requirements and demands almost daily. Citizens are becoming more vocal with respect to what
Slide 4 – Types of Change
•We should recognize that there are several different types of change that occur in public
organizations.
•But these changes take place within the context of the organization’s existing framework and
orientation; they involve solving problems or tinkering or fine-tuning ongoing operations. Each
effort builds on the existing work of the organization and occurs in relatively small increments.
These changes might be called incremental.
Slide 5 – Types of Change
•On the other hand, public managers increasingly are finding it necessary to make more
fundamental and dramatic changes in their organizations.
Slide 6 – Types of Change
•Strategic changes often are developed in the course of a strategic planning process that
considers the mission, vision, and values of the organization; those forces acting on the
organization from the environment; the strengths and weaknesses of the existing organization;
desired future states or “scenarios of the future”; and tactics that might be employed to move the
organization in the desired direction.
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
Slide 7 – Types of Change
•There are a variety of changes occurring in the organization, stimulated by quite different forces.
The trick for the manager is to be able to comprehend and manage the complexity of these forces
for change in a positive way.
Slide 8 – Rhythm of Change
Slide 9 – Approaches to Change
•Most contemporary approaches to understanding organizational change have their roots in the
early work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin wrote, “Group life is never without change,
merely differences in the amount and type of change exist.” If this is the case, then one way of
understanding the dynamics of organizational behavior is to examine the interplay of forces
affecting social change. In any given field of human endeavor, whether in an organization, a
social group, or a family, there are both forces trying to bring about change and forces trying to
resist change.
Slide 10 – Approaches to Change
•One more contemporary way of understanding organizational change relies on a concept
borrowed from anthropology—the concept of culture. Although anthropologists themselves
disagree on the exact meaning of culture, the term generally is taken to embrace those norms,
Slide 11 – Approaches to Change
•Ott outlined six elements of the notion of organizational culture on which he found general
consensus.
Slide 12 – SMART Goals
•The importance of the SMART goal for the organization is to “obtain goal commitment” by the
employees. The next two steps, ensuring integrity and accessibility of the managers in the
organization, are especially important for overall performance and reaching goals as a result.
Slide 13 – Open Systems
•Another way of viewing organizational change, one closely related to and often overlapping with
the cultural approach, is sometimes called organizational learning and is sometimes described as
building a learning organization.
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
Slide 14 – Systems Theory
•The systems approach can be applied to a wide variety of focal organizations, including
organizations, subunits, or sets of organizations, any one of which can be analyzed in terms of
the flow of inputs, the processing of these, and the production of goods or services that are the
outputs of the system. This approach also helps to clarify the relationships between the focal
organization and actors in the environment as well as the relationships among various
organizational components such as technology, structure, behavior, and culture. The systems
approach is therefore seen as a way of ensuring attention to the “big picture.”
Slide 15 – Basic Systems Model
•Systems theory emerged in the social and organizational sciences during the 1960s and 1970s
after enjoying success in areas such as biology and cybernetics before that. In all cases, the
basic systems model showed the system (whether biological, political, or organizational) first
Slide 16 – The Fifth Discipline
•The Fifth Discipline brought the idea of learning organizations to prominence. Senge suggested
five “disciplines” in which individuals can engage to build a learning organization.
Slide 17 – Pursuit of Significance
•Denhardt’s study examined the way in which managers approach the question of change in their
organizations, particularly the values that they wish to instill as a matter of culture. Among the
themes that emerged in the work are:
Slide 18 – “Great” Public Organizations
•Collins offered five essential elements for building “great” public organizations.
•Defining “great.” Public organizations should strive for excellence in delivering services. “What
matters is not finding the perfect indicator, but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of
assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor.”
•Level 5 leadership. The Level 5 leader is the leader able to “build enduring greatness through a
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
engine.” Passion refers to the organization’s values and core mission; best at refers to the
activities that are unique to the organization; resource engine refers to the appropriate
combination of time, money, and brand.
Slide 19 – Large Systems Change
•The notion is that change doesn’t come about through the accumulation of individually controlled
changes, but systemically through a focus on the whole.
•“The primary job of leadership . . . is to enhance the individual and systemic capacity to see, to
deeply attend to the reality that people face and enact. Thus the leader’s real work is to help
people discover the power of seeing and seeing together.” Scharmer described seven inflection
Slide 20 – Approaches to Change
•Whether we conceive of organizational change in terms of an interplay of driving and restraining
forces, building or remodeling an organization’s culture, or building a capacity for organizational
learning, there are several specific strategies or techniques that may be helpful in bringing about
organizational change.
•Many managers also seek to bring about changes in their organizations through restructuring or
redesigning their organizations’ structures, their basic work processes, and their core systems.
Such efforts are deeply rooted in the history of organizational change; reorganization is a familiar
Slide 21 – Approaches to Change
•Traditionally, discussions of organizational structure have centered on several key questions. The
most important of these is how various functions and the employees associated with those
functions should be grouped in units such as departments, divisions, and sections. Early on,
Mooney and Reiley (1939), two former General Motors executives, suggested several types of
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
Slide 22 – Organizational Design
•Gulick suggested that work can be divided (or functions grouped).
Slide 23 – OD Values
•OD represents a particular philosophy at odds with traditional top-down tendencies. According to
Golembiewski, this philosophy includes these values.
Slide 24 – OD Strategies
•Whatever their philosophies, OD practitioners typically employ a variety of strategies and
techniques to help facilitate organizational change.
•T-groups. The earliest (and still most controversial) OD interventions evolved from the T-group
(with T standing for training) or sensitivity group movement of the 1960s. T-groups involve 10 to
12 members and a facilitator brought together for an extended period in an unstructured group
situation where the group must create its own agenda, its own norms and expectations, and its
own models for appropriate behavior.
•Process consultation. As mentioned earlier, process consultation is concerned with helping a
client or client group understand more clearly and act on those process issues that arise in
organizational settings. These process issues include but are not limited to communications, the
roles and functions of group members, group problem solving and decision making, the
development and maintenance of group norms and expectations, and the role of leadership,
Slide 25 – Appreciative Inquiry
•A more recent variant of the organization development approach is called appreciative inquiry,
sometimes abbreviated AI.
Slide 26 – Six Sigma
•A dramatically different, but also popular approach to change management is called Six Sigma.
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
•Implementing Six Sigma starts with a management decision on what the organization needs to
achieve: a full-scale change (business transformation), strategic improvements limited to one or
two critical needs, or solving persistent problems within the organization.
Slide 27 – Management of Change
•Public managers often are called on to bring about substantial change in their agencies. Some
managers are specifically hired to “fix” existing agencies. But even for managers who have been
Slide 28 – Steps in Transformation
•Nadler, et al, suggested five phases in the change process.
Slide 29 – Change in Public Organizations
•Public organizations present unique problems and opportunities for managers seeking
organizational changes.
Slide 30 – Ethics
•Although many consider management to be a fairly technical endeavor, there are important value
questions that affect almost everything that managers do. Managers deal with humans and play a
significant role in shaping the lives of those within and outside of their organizations. In so doing,
they bear a special responsibility to their employees and the citizens they serve, a responsibility
to engage in behavior that is not only efficient and effective but also ethical.
Slide 31 – Dependent Skills
•To be successful in changing public organizations, managers must develop a fairly specific set of
skills necessary to the change process. As we have mentioned, many of these skills are what are
Slide 32 – Ways of Acting
•People may oppose change for rational and objective reasons, but resistance also may indicate
the play of emotional and psychological forces. People generally are more comfortable with
patterns of behavior that are familiar to them. Changing those patterns requires a psychological
adaptation, which often is quite difficult.
–When people operate in one way for a long period of time, they come to think that is the
only way of operating. That is why people justify keeping things as they are by saying,
“We’ve always done it that way.” That might be true, but there also might be other ways of
operating that will be far more effective.
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Instructor Resources
Denhardt, Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations 4th edition
SAGE Publications 2016
–People are more likely to accept changes if they fully understand what is going on and if
they feel a sense of “ownership” of the changes that are being made. Even more
important, as one state productivity improvement director commented, “The people who
do the work know the work best and know best how to improve the work.”
Slide 33 – Ways of Acting
•The first step in bringing about change is to fully understand the organization and its
stakeholders. Take time to listen to citizens, employees, clients, legislators, and those in various
interest groups. Find out what they think about the organization and how it might be improved.
Heed the advice of a local government budget officer who said, “If our city manager comes up
with ten ideas a year, that’s good. But if a thousand people in the organization each come up with
one, that’s even better.
–Although only individuals, and not organizations, are capable of learning, it is possible for
you to affect the conditions under which learning that is helpful to the organization might
occur. Individual insights and perceptions must be allowed to flow out into the larger
organization where their impact will be greatest.
–Where those in the organization are facing decisions that are routine or repetitive,
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